AdaCamp and other Ada Initiative events

AdaCamper Jen Mei Wu, photo by Sarah Sharp

In June, the Ada Initiative ran AdaCamp San Francisco, the third AdaCamp bringing women and their allies in open technology and culture together to talk about issues and problems women face and about how to solve them. AdaCamp continues to be our most popular and effective program for recruiting and retaining women in open tech/culture, which is why we invest about 3 months of staff time on each AdaCamp. For example, 85% of attendees surveyed said that AdaCamp San Francisco increased their commitment to open tech/culture!

AdaCamp San Francisco was our largest AdaCamp to date, double the size of AdaCamp DC in July 2012, with about 200 attendees. It was the first AdaCamp to feature a dedicated one-day allies track for people of any gender. To increase the diversity of the event we offered travel scholarships to attendees from countries including the United States, Canada, Mexico, India and Cambodia. AdaCamp is an unconference, and attendee-led sessions included: a Likeability Paradox discussion; diversity beyond gender, depression in activists, womyn of color, job seeking and career advice, and expressing femininity in technical spaces. We also incorporated Impostor Syndrome training and a make-a-thon and hackfest for the first time. Find out more about AdaCamp in our AdaCamp SF final report!

While traveling back to India, I was deeply satisfied. I had too many projects in mind, and the potential to work towards accomplishing them – Ada Camp put me in touch with the right people and right resources to get me started. Listening to the success stories of other participants helped me overcome my initial inertia, and stimulated me to work hard towards increasing the participation of women in Wikimedia projects.

In March we ran a smaller event, the first Ada Initiative feminist hacker lounge, at PyCon US in Santa Clara. The feminist lounge was a casual space in the exhibition hall, sharing a beanbag hangout space with PyLadies, and hosting sessions including “Impostor Syndrome Check-in” and “Hackerspaces: What’s Working, What’s Not?” We enjoyed hosting this home base for women at the conference and have suggestions for how you can do it too!

What’s next? AdaCamp brings together so many women interested in working in and changing the open tech and culture space. AdaCamp is going to remain a core part of the Ada Initiative’s work. We are hoping to work with dedicated event staff on future AdaCamps and are considering host cities for AdaCamps in 2014 and 2015. We will also publish a collection of event advice, for running events that are open, accessible and welcoming to women in open tech and culture.

What’s next? We will continue to teach about and hold sessions on Impostor Syndrome at AdaCamps and add to our resources as we go.

Workshops and community-building for allies

CC-BY-SA Adam Novak

In 2013, we expanded our work educating and supporting allies – people who support women in open tech/culture but aren’t women themselves. The Ada Initiative Allies Workshop focuses on what individual people can do to make their workplace or community a better, more positive place for women. We started the Allies Workshop program in 2011 and have continued to improve and grow it every year. The Allies Workshop has been run three times in 2013 so far: at Everyone Hacks San Francisco, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Allies Track of AdaCamp San Francisco. We recently posted a professionally recorded and captioned video of the Allies Workshop.

This year we ran the first Allies Track, a one-day meeting for allies of women in open tech/culture to get to know each other, share best practices, and make plans for the future, held in conjunction with AdaCamp San Francisco. About 20 allies of all genders attended, along with several dozen visitors from the AdaCamp main track. Attendee Jeff Pollet wrote, “It was […] nice to be surrounded by a bunch of smart men advocating for feminism in tech.”

What’s next? The Ada Initiative is growing the Allies Workshops into a core program and expanding the number of workshops we teach. To find out more about holding the allies workshop for your project or organization, see our Allies workshop page. We are also in the early stages of developing a training program for workshop facilitators, to train others to deliver the workshop. We also plan to expand the Allies Track at the next AdaCamp.

Supporting women open source developers

In April 2013, the Ada Initiative in partnership with GitHub offered private repositories to women learning open source software, giving people from underrepresented groups a chance to practice and grow their programming skills in private before participating in the mainstream open source community, where women often face higher levels of harassment than men both online and in person. This program has been enormously popular, with over 500 women requesting a free repository, showing the effectiveness of outreach programs targeted specifically at women.

What’s next? We are open to partnerships with organizations who want to support women by donating resources, but don’t have the expertise or infrastructure to run them on their own. Email contact@adainitiative.org to learn more.

What’s next? We will continue to keep an eye out for emerging issues and help boost campaigns led by others, as well as start our own campaigns. Your support through speaking up in your community is crucial to the kind of culture change we’re working for.

Press appearances and speaking engagements

CC-BY-SA Adam Novak

In 2013, the Ada Initiative became a go-to resource for journalists wanting to know more about the problems facing women in open technology and culture, both in the tech press and the mainstream media. In March, Valerie Aurora discussed the firing of Adria Richards in Slate, writing that:

one thing we can agree on is that the massive onslaught of rape and death threats [directed at Richards]… was wrong… It’s up to us to change the culture of consequence-free online harassment.

In June, we reached one million readers of the U.S. print edition of Marie Claire in “When Geeks Attack” by veteran feminist journalist Alissa Quart, writing:

… Thanks to the anonymity of the Internet, fueled by a dogmatic belief that all speech is free speech, [Internet attackers] have made the very act of being a woman in the industry something of an occupational hazard.

We can’t do it without you!

2013 has been a good year for women in open tech/culture so far, thanks to people like you! Without our hundreds of generous donors and the many community members who stood up for their beliefs, 2013 would have been a bleak year for women in open tech/culture. You are a critical part of a massive, world-wide movement to give women an equal voice and role in online culture. Thank you!